Communication networks allow both one-to-one and group communications. Group communications can take a number of different forms, such as interconnect voice conference calls, and predefined dispatch group calls, e.g., those provided by the iDEN network owned and operated by Sprint Nextel Corporation. Typically group communications are performed and managed in a “siloed” manner such that individual applications manage their own group data and provide application/service-specific methods for group management. For example, a network operator may offer both dispatch group calls and groups for multi-media messaging (MMS). A group that is defined for a dispatch group call must be recreated for the MMS group because these group definitions are maintained in separate databases.
Recently the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) published the “XML Document Management Requirements” Approved Version 1.0 paper (OMA-RD-XDM-V1—0-20060612-A), the entire disclosure of which is herein expressly incorporated by reference. This paper describes the use of XML documents for group management. However, this paper focuses on the use of groups for OMA Service Enablers in general such as Push-To-Talk over Cellular (PoC), Presence Services etc. The paper and the associated release documents do not address a number of issues such as charging, group distribution, policy and delegation rules, opting into (opt-in) and opting out (opt-out) of a group, multiple address and translation requirements and other membership rules.